You're not supposed to top healing meters as a holy paladin, if you are it's either because the other healers in your team are taking on the wrong role or are simply playing poorly. Other reason is if you're taking on the wrong role and blanketing the raid in EF's with the intention to "top healing meters". Holy paladins are about utility and their strength is in things like beacon, double hands, etc. A paladin who is topping meters on a lot of fights should be more concerned than anything. Then again, i think that HPS is the most uninteresting thing ever personally. Whatever keeps the raid alive.

what are you talking about

as a paladin you are supposed to be the top healer in your raid, second possibly only to any disc priests there, in almost all situations

if you think that you're "supposed" to not do good hps as a paladin, then you are simply an idiot.

if holy paladins were brought for their utiltiy, then you would never bring a holy paladin, because prot and ret paladins bring the same things while doing other stuff very well as well

you bring a holy paladin for the extremely strong, versatile hps and the utility

Originally Posted by rinleezwins

They might not top the meters, but bear in mind all the utility they bring into a single 10man fight: devotion aura, hop, sacrifice + best tools to keep a tank alive.

Hpalas won't be as high as disc on most fights (unless it's one that heavily favors SS they should be up there though), but they can easily output as much healing as the other healers (and considering that part of it is absorbs that generally results in them being higher on the meters as well). They have the best tankhealing and brings the most utility of any healer, neither of these things show up in the meter. Unlike disc they don't have any big weaknesses (poor healing on the move, no bursthealing) but they hardly excel at healing massive raiddamage (which is why you'd grp them with a disc now, or a druid/mw post 5.2). Unless you already have a paladin in the raid (and possibly even then) I'd argue that a hpala brings even more to a raidgrp than a disc priest right now.

So you're saying that its ok to not perform well because we're not supposed to? That sounds kind of pathetic and lazy to me. If you aren't trying to perform to the best of your ability then I really don't know why a raid group would bother keeping you around anyway. Yzyz said it perfectly. If you are deliberately putting out less healing because you've stubornly decided to not play the most powerful playstyle, whatever it may be, then you have no business in a raid group.

Whoa cowboy, slow down. That wasn't what i meant, what i meant is that if you are putting out the biggest HPS numbers on a consistent basis with monks, shamans or priests in your healing team either of you are most likely not playing to your strengths. I'm not saying holadins can't do a lot of HPS, i'm saying this isn't necessarily the design intent behind the spec.

Whoa cowboy, slow down. That wasn't what i meant, what i meant is that if you are putting out the biggest HPS numbers on a consistent basis with monks, shamans or priests in your healing team either of you are most likely not playing to your strengths. I'm not saying holadins can't do a lot of HPS, i'm saying this isn't necessarily the design intent behind the spec.

So your point is that if I'm doing the most healing (again, healing, not HPS, big difference), I'm not playing to my class' strengths? Well, I give up. Someone else feel free to explain that logic to me.

I would point out that one of the "strengths" of the paladin spec is being able to roll powerful healing with EF that also produces a lot of healing on the tank through beacon in addition to generating absorb shields on half the raid with relatively low mana consumption. But maybe that's not the "strength" you were talking about.

Whoa cowboy, slow down. That wasn't what i meant, what i meant is that if you are putting out the biggest HPS numbers on a consistent basis with monks, shamans or priests in your healing team either of you are most likely not playing to your strengths. I'm not saying holadins can't do a lot of HPS, i'm saying this isn't necessarily the design intent behind the spec.

How is consistently outhpsing all the other healers somehow mutually exclusive, in your mind, as it has to be for this line of argument to make sense, to simultaneously utilizing all the utility available to the class and spec? Spending maybe 10 GCDs casting hands in a fight doesn't reduce your HPS in any meaningful way, especially when you can intelligently plan the use of those abilities to get around having to use them when you'd rather be casting heals. Even if utilizing hpaladin utility did reduce hps, it would reduce the healing of all other healers present at the same time, and so not impact the relative comparisons much.

Anyway... in terms of practically achievable HPS, hpaladins outpreform all classes and all specs, except disc priests, in almost all settings currently. What makes you think that this is not "necessarily the design intent behind the spec", when it makes no sense for this not to be the case, when it goes against blizzard's repeatedly publically stated design intent goal (that classes shouldn't be inhibited in hps/dps/tanking potential by the utility they bring), and - most importantly - when it isn't the case according to all the available information?

Not really true; hpaladins have much stronger sponteneous on-demand healing than priests do, their healing requiring essentially no set-up time whatsoever, and they aren't inhibited by the need to stand still and cast slow prayers of healing when they want to do a lot of HPS. They also have the hands, and bubble, which are extremely strong utility on many fights, even if any spec brings that.

Count a disc priest's DPS in with their HPS, and I guess you're right, though. No way a hpala can compare then. They also have nothing that can match DA/SS blanketing, which makes many fights a joke currently... but there's always tsulong!

spontaneously putting a 130k pw:s on someone, or spontaneously using Holy Fire.
Pain sup, Barrier, SS, MD, 50% of a DPS and 100% of a healer at the same time. seems like a lot of utility to me.

Whoa cowboy, slow down. That wasn't what i meant, what i meant is that if you are putting out the biggest HPS numbers on a consistent basis with monks, shamans or priests in your healing team either of you are most likely not playing to your strengths. I'm not saying holadins can't do a lot of HPS, i'm saying this isn't necessarily the design intent behind the spec.

If I am putting out high HPS on a consistent basis, I would argue that I am playing to my characters strengths moreso then someone who isn't. High HPS and straight up healing is the design intent for all healing classes. I don't see any logic in your posts. Why would you sit there and say that we shouldn't put up high numbers because we are Paladins? Why is it ok to say "Oh, sorry my numbers are low, I am a pally"? Live in the now bro. We are no longer 100% tank heals. We bring utility, single target, and AOE heals. If you aren't utilizing everything in your arsenal, you aren't, as you put it, playing to your strengths. Bring the player, not the class.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.